Zabelle
Kerning Cultures
Kerning Cultures Network
4.9 • 529 Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2020
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1917, a musical prodigy called Zabelle Panosian recorded a song that captured the heartbreak of a generation of Armenian Americans in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide. She toured the world, selling thousands of records. And then, she was almost completely forgotten. This is her story.
This episode was produced by Alex Atack with editorial support from Dana Ballout, Tamara Rasamny, Nadeen Shaker, Zeina Dowidar, and Hebah Fisher. Sound design by Alex Atack and Mohamed Khreizat, and fact-checking by Zeina Dowidar. Kerning Cultures is a Kerning Cultures Network production.
Support this podcast on Patreon for as little as $1 a month.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Our story today comes from producer Alex A-Tac, and it starts in a ballroom inside the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. |
| 0:10.6 | If the room had rafters, you'd say it was packed to the rafters. |
| 0:14.2 | But it didn't, because rooms as fancy as this generally don't. |
| 0:17.5 | Instead, it had chandeliers, probably at least eight of them. |
| 0:20.3 | The edges were lined with |
| 0:21.3 | wide doorways and heavy curtains were pulled shut over those to keep the sound in. The room was so |
| 0:26.1 | full that in a photograph taken from the stage that evening, the date was October 9th, 1919. The entire |
| 0:32.3 | bottom half of the photograph is just faces crowded around tables in rows that go all the way |
| 0:36.7 | to the back of the room. |
| 0:38.2 | It was a political event. |
| 0:39.5 | Influential Americans like the governor of Massachusetts sat at tables with influential Armenians like Armenia's prime minister at the time. |
| 0:46.5 | The Armenians were trying to create support in the United States. |
| 0:51.7 | And so this prime minister had come to try to drop support, political support and military support from the United States. And so this dinner was held in honor of him. |
| 1:01.3 | This is the writer, Marian Mesrobian McCurdy. Her grandmother was in the room that night, sitting somewhere near the front on table number 34. |
| 1:08.7 | So she was very proud to have been asked to attend and be there. |
| 1:13.1 | This is a really big event for her and for most of the people in the community. |
| 1:18.8 | It was four years after the end of the event that came to define the first part of the century for Armenians. |
| 1:24.8 | The Ottoman Army's Campaign of Terror in which they massacred 1.5 million Armenians. |
| 1:30.1 | Today we call it the Armenian genocide, but that word, a word used to describe massacres as |
| 1:35.1 | horrific as these, didn't exist in the English language at the time. It was literally indescribable. |
| 1:41.7 | So in that room on that night in October 1919, the Armenian community was gathered to rally support for the future of their nation and for their fellow Armenians back home in the old country. |
| 1:51.3 | That dinner was an effort to create this urgency and interest to collect money, to collect support in order to try to maintain what they had started |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Kerning Cultures Network, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Kerning Cultures Network and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.